


In The Dark

by Wecanhaveallthree



Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 09:37:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21251282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wecanhaveallthree/pseuds/Wecanhaveallthree
Summary: When the Cicatrix Maledictum opened, ancient weapons and terrible prisoners were released from the Dark Cells below the Imperial Palace...





	In The Dark

A prison can be many things. It can be simple: a rope, a manacle, iron bars, a cell. It can be complex: a relationship, an obsession, or something even more ethereal. Around every life, every soul, is a cage, often of that soul’s own making. They beat the walls with bloodied fists and cry their innocence, yet they know - they know - that this is justice. In their secret hearts, they yearn for the noose, the hood, the fatal drop.

In this twilight world, the lines between those who are punished and those who enact the sentence are redrawn. Borders blur. The yearning for the flail is matched only by the need of the one who wields it.

The man who ordered the Dark Cells built understood this. He understood very well indeed when he denied the most violent, the most dangerous, the most worthy of punishment the hangman’s absolution or warden’s lash. Their blood was poison: it would not be allowed to spread, to infect.

If there was pain - if there was death - it would come only from the inhabitants themselves. They would know only their own sins.

Forever.

The Dark Cells had grown over time. It would not be hyperbole to say that none of the Shadowkeepers truly knew to what extent, or how this was achieved. The complex had spread like the petals of some night-blooming flower along tunnels cut before the Palace had stood. There was a sense of design and purpose to the growth, as though the need for expansion had been foreseen long ago - or that the complex itself understood what had happened in the world above.

Not that the world above or beyond affected the Dark Cells. It had been designed as a completely self-sufficient arcology so that even were the surface of the Throneworld engulfed in nuclear flames or tormented by virus bombs, operations below would continue without interruption.

The staff of the Dark Cells required no sustenance, no rest, no instruction. They held the keys. They turned the locks. They carried the victuals for those prisoners that required them. They were a legion of silent, grey automatons, yoked to their tasks without complaint - without any feeling at all, so it seemed. Mankind had been forbidden from the secrets of the Dark Age, the abominable intelligences that had nearly brought the species to extinction - but there had always been privileges that the architect allowed only himself.

He had trusted the greatest reservoir of evil in the Imperium to the soulless. And they had served well, had they not? The automaton can only do what it is told. It does not have a mind. It does not have a heart. It could not be bought, or bribed, or swayed to another purpose.

Yet when the Maledictum’s weird light fell upon Terra, yet when the Shadowkeepers were called to do battle, certain cells were opened. Certain items were taken. Certain occupants were spirited away.

The architect had been wrong before.

Who comes to this cell, so heavy of tread, so sure of their way on the Ring of Malebolge, that layer of the Dark? Who passes by the bronzed plaques stencilled with names and crimes (the giving of false testimony, violation of temporal propriety, and more, and more)? Who turns the key that unseals the nightmare chamber? Who - for the first time in three hundred years - looks upon the starved, hunched body of its inhabitant?

Oh, she has been fed. Bread. Water. A gruel that is indistinguishable from either. These keep the vessel alive. They do not satisfy stranger appetites.

The prisoner licks her cracked lips. Her voice is mangled by disuse. These are paltry things.

‘Who?’ she asks. It is the right question. Someone wishes her free, to do what she does.

The reply is a single word. No - a name?

A name.

‘Dume.’

Another.

‘Khayon.’

She does not ask why, or why _now_. She knows - she senses, at least - that something broke the prison’s careful routine some time ago. She had known nothing of it and had not been part of any escape attempt since her incarceration. For this to happen now, removed from that disruption, is a tremendous risk for whoever seeks her release.

There is an honour, of a sort, amongst thieves. Never mind that Narthan Dume was executed and his familial line torn out root and stem in the bloodbath of Unification. The name is not just a name: it is a command. The second

‘I accept.’

A serviceable Ministorum clerical robe is passed to her, along with immaculate idents and a vial of mutative that will fool the gene-scanners. She quaffs it, remembering the acid burn on her tongue, and dresses quickly. She has spent centuries without clothes, the temperature of her cell kept at the threshold of human tolerance, but it is not that simple luxury that drives her to haste - it is the discomfort of the eyes that never leave her.

A pair of simple clogs and a fabric band complete the disguise, every inch another filthy priestess preaching to the wretched in the innumerable slums of the Throneworld.

It will be a long walk to rise to even the lowest levels of human scum. The Dark Cells are modelled on ancient and sacred geometry, their very shape a ward against corruption. Stairways that loop in on themselves, endless halls that serve no discernible purpose - the Cells were a labyrinth of the old kind, built on secrets, to keep secrets.

She welcomes it. The first burst blisters. The blood that washes her feet.

It is only right, coming forth from the cold earth like Laurzaros who rose, that she be baptised anew.


End file.
